Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/213

 the red globe seemed to rest upon the water; a cone of luminous white light replaced it in the heavens; and on each side of it there glowed another crimson sun.

It was but the optical effect well known to astronomers, due to the refraction and reflection of light. But it terrified philosophers and astrologists and conquerors in days of old, and startled her now.

The long curved shores, the sea still as 'a painted ocean,' the grey skies with their pallid mists, the black heaps of putrefying weed upon the beach, the fierce sickly heat that had a pressure on the brain like the heavy hand of an invisible god—these were all too familiar to her to seem strange, but the white iridescent intense light of this atmospheric phænomenon she had never seen, for in these latitudes it is rare.

She stood still and looked at it as Antoninus, and Pliny, and Constantine had looked before her in the same wonder; herself, black as a figure on a camera against the yellow haze of sea and sky.

As she gazed in some vague awe, beholding the sun thus multiplied, she saw the head of a man in the sea. He seemed not to swim, but to be at the pleasure of the